Posts Tagged ‘Olympics’

Last week, the Philadelphia Union signed 31 year-old Guatemalan international forward Carlos Ruiz, a.k.a. “El Pescadito” (“the little fish” in Spanish), throwing a confusing curveball to Philadelphia sports fans. My guess is we’ll be hearing the nickname more around here, since the Phillies already have a Central American player named Carlos Ruiz on their roster (he’s their catcher, hails from Panama, and is nicknamed “Chooch,” which I’m guessing we’ll be hearing a lot more around here now as well).

While the Guatemalan, soccer-playing Ruiz has competed all over the world and is well known in his homeland as the country’s all-time leading goal scorer in international competition and is well known among Major League Soccer fans in this country from his days with the L.A. Galaxy and FC Dallas, what people might not know is that he’s played in Pennsylvania before — in central Pa., particularly.

Way back in 2000, when he was a promising 20 year-old playing professionally for Municipal in Guatemala and a member of the country’s U-23 national team, the North American qualifying tournament for the Summer Olympics was held, bizarrely, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, of all places.

Unlike the World Cup, the Olympics are contested by countries’ U-23 teams, rather than the full national teams. I was actually lucky enough to have met Ruiz back then, as each of the colleges and universities near Hershey basically adopted one of the national teams and hosted all of their training sessions. I was in charge of athletic communications for the school that got Guatemala, and I got to work with them quite a bit in coordinating local media coverage.

The scene of the 2000 Olympic qualifiers.

That wasn’t an easy task, as the head coach was a little more than slightly paranoid about anyone from the other teams turning on the local TV news and seeing anything that might potentially give away the tiniest detail about their training sessions and game strategies. For the first day or two, they were more like the Brigadoon national team, as they would mysteriously vanish when cameras approached, and then magically reappear when they retreated. Eventually, we got things sorted out.

On the whole, though, it was a great experience, especially since at the time I was still in my first year out of college and was the same age as nearly all of the players on the team. Carlos Ruiz certainly stood out back then, but I never would have guessed that in another two years he would jump from Municipal to the Los Angeles Galaxy and end up as the MLS Most Valuable Player his first year in the league, nor would I have guessed at the time that he would eventually become Guatemala’s all-time leading scorer in international competition.

His signing now is definitely a good pickup for the Union. After an offseason largely spent finding ways to plug up the obvious defensive holes from their inaugural season, bringing in Ruiz fills another big need, which is taking some opposing defensive pressure off Sebastien Le Toux and Danny Mwanga. Even if he isn’t quite at the same level as a goal scorer he was when he played for L.A., he’ll be a helpful presence in relieving pressure. Also, having Le Toux take corner kicks, which seemed kind of strange for much of last year when he was the team’s only reliable scorer, would make more sense now with Ruiz on the field at the same time and Mwanga with a year of pro experience under his belt.

Besides, I’m of the opinion that he still has quite a few productive years left. While he struggled to score in the first half of the 2010-11 Greek Super League season for Aris Thessaloniki, somebody doesn’t score three goals in a handful of Europa League games over that same span by being washed up. Context is certainly going to be key for Ruiz’s scoring opportunities, and potentially having Le Toux and Mwanga on the field at the same time will definitely create opportunities for him.

I know people said the same thing about the Eiffel Tower back in the day, but what the hell?!

The thing looks like a partially-melted roller coaster, which I guess sort of fits with the random gigantic ferris wheel London already has.

Anish Kapoor’s “Orbit” sculpture will stand 120 meters (about 131 yards) high in the midst of London’s 2012 Olympic venues. It’s part of an effort to avoid an Athens 2004 situation, where many of the Olympic venues are basically just sitting around without a whole lot of use for them. The sculpture is supposed to help turn the area into a major tourist attraction once the Olympics are over.

My guess is that people will come from all over the world to stare and say, “Damn that’s ugly!” In which case it would in fact serve its purpose brilliantly.

While the city is at it, Londoners could also transform the clock in Big Ben into something that looks like it stepped out of Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. Combine that and “Orbit” with the London Eye, and the city’s new tourism slogan could be, “London: Godzilla’s amusement park.”

The news came out today that in advance of the 2008 Summer Olympics the Chinese government took it upon itself to create a sort-of “enemies list” of U.S. athletes it feared might cause politically motivated trouble during the Games. Several of them weren’t even competing.

One of those was U.S. women’s soccer player (and soon to be absurdly high-scoring forward for the Washington Freedom of Women’s Professional Soccer — beginning play in April 2009! Sorry for the shameless promotional plug there . . .) Abby Wambach, who missed the Olympics with a broken leg.

Upon hearing today that she was on the Chinese government shit list, Wambach, a member of the organization Team Darfur, said, “This may be the biggest compliment of my life.”